Heinz-Uwe Haus and theatre making in Cyprus and Greece
Edited by Heinz-Uwe Haus and Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe
Cambridge Scholars Publishing £68.99

HEINZ-UWE HAUS is the East German theatre director credited with kick-starting the National Theatre of Cyprus through a series of popular productions of Brecht and ancient Greek classics in the mid-70s.

It is a poisoned legacy.

Haus was invited to make his cultural initiative when Cyprus, under Archbishop Makarios, was still united if riven by the inter-communal violence that was a legacy of British imperialism.

Makarios’s vision of Cypriot independence had sought partnership in the non-aligned movement, and hence came cultural exchange with the Soviet bloc.

Haus signed the contract and applied for the visa before the events of 1974, when systematic violence against the Turkish minority resulted in retaliatory invasion, partition along lines originally drawn by the British, and organised ethnic cleansing, a total exchange of populations along lines agreed and co-ordinated by the regimes of presidents Glafcos Clerides and Rauf Denktash.

These two London-educated lawyers were both deeply implicated in terror campaigns and needed to rewrite the legal and historical script of their respective communities to maintain power and immunity from prosecution. This couldn’t be achieved with a mixed population and a united working class.

Haus chose to enter this violent reality on the Greek Cypriot side with a production of Brecht’s Caucasia Chalk Circle, and his book, which combines interviews, production notes and philosophical musings with an extensive compilation of reviews and reactions, celebrates this event.

The play is about a country at war, in which hope for the future is symbolised by a baby whose parentage is disputed. The judge Azdak, like Solomon, proposes that the child is divided. The foster mother, who loves the child, lets go.

But this isn’t what happened in Cyprus.

It is hard to believe that someone from Haus’s background didn't see the reality – that the Cypriot working class and peasantry (who had more in common with one another than with their cynical ethno-nationalist ruling class) had been divided by an organised plan, with great violence, and oppressed.

It is even harder to believe that Brecht would have staged the play the way Haus did. Brecht – ever fond of the shock effect – would surely have rewritten the ending and shown that the bible was wrong. The child was in fact torn in two, like Cyprus itself. There is a strident lawyer, onstage, calling for this very outcome…

But Haus has no interest in reality, or politics, and uses Brecht to throw his lot in with the cultural right wing, the partisans of Greek ethnic superiority. This atrocious abuse of Brecht’s legacy goes unremarked throughout this tedious and self-congratulatory amalgam of un-self-critical pseudo-scholarship.

Without a whisper of irony he describes himself in terms the Cypriot bourgeois would appreciate, as a sufferer of “socialist disenfranchisement” in a “stasi state” (the system to which he owed his education).

He immediately allows ruling class cliché — so-called Greek “antiquity” — to trump class politics and confirm what he calls his “solidarity with the rightful Cypriot state and its people.”

His audience is never imagined as working class but as Greeks “familiar with their mythic heritage.” Turkish Cypriots are neither workers nor even humans but “Ottoman imperialists.” And all the while he gives lectures on Brecht’s aesthetics in a perfect demonstration of the eclipse of politics by formalism.

It’s a long book, and only for dedicated fans. There is not one single photograph of his theatre — a stunning omission — but there are many pages of text.

Haus directs many productions in both Cyprus and Greece and can’t restrain himself, in an excruciating exercise of ideological contortion, from commenting on religious belief, culture, post-modernism... you name it. Deprived of the compass of Marx he swings wildly from fad to cliché and back again.

His career and this book prove that he was for a while an acceptable tool in the project of Greek Cypriot bourgeois society, and a mirror in which their hypocrisy and crimes could be reflected as cleverness, European-ness, and above all, cultural superiority.

A travesty.